2008 was great for me

2008 was great for me

2008 was great for me

1/4
Sam Leith

Books and the man: Sam has time on his hands to mug up on writing that novel he’s always promised to get round to

2/4
Gavanndra Hodge

Mother’s delight: Gavanndra and daughter Hebe

3/4
Liz Hoggard

Wheel progress: Liz on one of her assignments

4/4
Sophia Money-Coutts

Off to sunnier climes: Sophia Money-Coutts

Books and the man: Sam has time on his hands to mug up on writing that novel he’s always promised to get round to

It will go down in history as the year of financial meltdown. But not everyone felt gloomy. As 2008 closes, four writers reveal how the past 12 months turned out well...

Sam Leith

THIS year didn't turn out precisely as I'd expected. I'll admit that. If you'd asked me in January, I'd complacently have anticipated heading into Christmas as a positive advert for job security: 10 years in post, muddling along happily enough, a nice warm groove in the seat of my office chair moulded perfectly to the contours of my rear end, and nursing the same unaccomplished pipe-dream of Going Freelance And Writing A Novel.

Then, along came the recession and I suddenly, on a Tuesday morning, found myself out of a job. Most inconvenient, I thought - not least because earlier in the year I'd asked my girlfriend to marry me and, what's more, she'd said yes so I'd just arranged a full-stretch mortgage to buy what we hoped would be our family house in Archway. And so on and so forth.

But, you know, this could turn out for the best. It so happened that just a couple of days before my new, um, career commenced, I was talking to a publisher about this long unaccomplished pipe-dream of writing a novel. And they liked the idea. And so just a couple of days into my new career, I did a deal for just that novel. That was an odd coincidence - which was nice, since the novel is, coincidentally, called The Coincidence Engine. Now I just have to think up a plot - and I have time to do so.

So I urge anyone else facing the P45 to do so with a smile on your face and hope in your heart. Go back to school, emigrate to Thailand, retrain as an electrician, write that novel, spurn the hedge fund and do something fulfilling with your life. Full-time employment is a velvet-lined coffin - and only vampires live in those.

Gavanndra Hodge

I spent most of 2008 in happy anticipation. After three months of trying to get pregnant (with a month off for festivities in December) it finally happened in early January, a week into my fertility detox. Initial euphoria was replaced by three months of low-level worry, partly because I had so few symptoms. I had no morning sickness, tiredness or insomnia. So it was hard to believe that there was anything in there at all until the bizarre and wonderful experience of the 12-week scan, when I saw my baby for the first time, a little fossil-like creature with a perfect spine and tiny digits, bouncing up and down as if she was on a trampoline (I knew from the very start that she was a girl).

The next four months were pretty blissful: the mediocre summer meant I never got too hot and I could sanction the consumption of endless plates of cheese on toast, as dairy products are good for growing bones. Inevitably there were a couple of low moments, like the time in late August when, vast and ponderous, I saw my bus pulling into the stop a few metres ahead of me and realised I could no longer run, or even walk fast.

Fortunately I did not have to endure late pregnancy for too long as I went into labour two-and-a-half weeks early, an experience that was improved no end when the gas and air was wheeled out. The six hours I spent bouncing on a Swiss ball with Kate Bush playing on the stereo and the nozzle attached to my face were actually quite fun. It wasn't all perfect, though, and slow progress plus a baby with an increasing heart-rate resulted in an emergency Caesarean and 10 minutes of terror as I was wheeled into theatre. But she was perfectly healthy and after a rub down by the midwives she was handed to my husband, who showed me our baby with her pink face, inquisitive eyes and a head full of hair, and said: "She's beautiful."

I was kept in hospital for five sunny September days in a curtained off cubicle staring at my daughter who slept peacefully (most of the time) in her little plastic cot.

Now, at three months, she doesn't sleep quite so much, but with her dimples and smiles, the strange squeaks she makes in her baby gym and the way she strokes my chest while she is feeding, my daughter Hebe is entirely delightful - and well worth waiting a year for.

Liz Hoggard

A year ago, when the editor of this newspaper asked me to write a column about the life of a chaotic fortysomething, I thought it might just be career suicide. We all know female journalists who have Revealed Far Too Much - and lived to regret it. How could I balance being honest with staying employable?

As it turns out, only just. But the avalanche of emails I have received in response to the column have been incredibly warm - and very funny. As I wrote about the challenges of learning to ride a bike properly on the streets of London; of being sent to Fat Camp; of older dating, people stopped me on the street - and once in the changing room at Jigsaw - to share their own humiliations. Perhaps we are all tired of hearing about impossibly glam lives.

Writing a column has changed my life in so many ways. When I banged on about my hair problems (thin, curly, inability to blow-dry), London's salons stepped in. In the space of a year I've had an Everlasting Blow-dry at Harvey Nichols (it lasted three months!), a personal makeover by New York hair king Paul Labrecque and more salon treatments than you can shake a stick at. After 20 years of short hair, I've even managed to grow it several inches.

I whinged about being too fat for ballet pumps. A pair of gold-sequined ballet flats arrived. I said I wasn't a proper girl because I don't do nail varnish. Cue a master class with nail guru Marian Newman, who does Kate Moss and Cate Blanchett.

I've been sent to Love School. I got my own personal hormone doctor (every girl should have one). I even went on an urban detox - though I reared up like a nervous horse when they tried to administer colonic irrigation. As I wrote at the time: "There are no more depressing words in the English language than: 'If you'd like to put your skirt back on.'" But every time I fell at a new beauty hurdle some enterprising PR came up with a solution.

It's hilarious, really. For years I've been pitching edgy arts stories to stony-faced commissioning editors, who never quite seemed to remember my name. Now I walk into parties and they say: "Tell me about your hair."

Of course, this is all ephemeral. One day I'll have to go back to short hair and flip-flops. Because it's dangerous getting expensive habits.

But what I've loved is the chance to say that your forties really can be the best time of your life. You have better friends, better sex, better parties. And in a newspaper world consumed by youth, that's such a privilege.

Sophia Money-Coutts

"Will it never end?" I sat thinking in varied classrooms and lecture halls between the age of four and 22, bored by the relentless pattern of essays, grades and exams neatly divided by long stretches of holidays. But having spent 18 ink-stained years in the education system, I was suddenly spat out at the other end in July 2007. So 2008 will always remain memorable to me because it marked my first whole year of "being a grown-up". It was the crucial junction at which I ticked off the "Education" box and embarked upon the next one, dauntingly marked "Rest of Life".

It wasn't a picnic at first. My alarm went off every day at 6.30am, and instead of thinking "Forget it, it's only a history tutorial," I had to roll out of bed and embrace the working day with as much enthusiasm as possible, even when it was Monday after a weekend in the pub. Commute to work, spend requisite number of hours at desk, commute home again - five times a week. I now know why, when my siblings and I were small, noisy beings that awoke every weekend at 6am, my parents insisted that we tiptoe downstairs and let them sleep for a few more hours. Whoever thought working life would be so exhausting?

But despite the early starts and financial gloom, I have not one complaint about being young, single and earning for the first time. In fact, it's been an exciting year of firsts - first proper job, first grown-up pay cheque, first (and last) time wasting entire said pay cheque on drinks with friends and recently I took Dad out for supper for the first time instead of vice versa.

Simultaneously, it's been a year of intense selfishness, because - like some kind of fledgling bird - being in your twenties surely means temporarily putting yourself above others?

For me, such self-centredness sounded the final death knell on my relationship with a long-term boyfriend last January, perhaps the low-point of an otherwise stellar 12 months. But I realised, along with many other friends at similar junctures, that I needed to focus on myself. "I just found myself asking him what he wanted for supper every evening," said an exasperated girlfriend who found herself newly single for similar reasons at the same time. Surely, that's the kind of conversational gambit reserved exclusively for long-married couples?

Some friends, admittedly, have found it tougher going; the City hasn't been kind to fellow graduates, for example. But one of the best things about being young (and perhaps naïve) is the optimism it affords. So this is why I've decided to remove myself from London and go abroad to Abu Dhabi. New job, new flat, new friends. "2008, 2000 and great" - as the saying went. So here's to 2009.